


Softly Glowing from Within

by formergirlwonder (orphan_account)



Series: Blue + Gold = Green [2]
Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Because Jughead feels bitter for Betty's sake, Betty is being rehabilitated, F/M, Featuring some unintentional Archie Andrews trashing, Jughead is a romantic at heart, Jughead thinks he might be ace, Jughead's Novel, Not that they need protecting but still, Ship War? What ship war?, Somebody protect these two now, Written pre 1x07 so I don't know when Mrs. Jones left, after spending 77 years being held captive, bughead - Freeform, called a love triangle, in a narrative holding pattern/detention center
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-06
Updated: 2017-03-06
Packaged: 2018-09-28 17:18:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10141253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/formergirlwonder
Summary: “Maybe I’m crazy like they are,” she blurted.Post 1x06. Jughead tries to decide how to address That Scene while writing his novel.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Bet you didn't expect me back this soon!
> 
> I am literally overwhelmed by all the love on my last fic! This fandom is the best, and you guys are what makes it the best!!! <3<3<3

The Variety Show was long over by the time Jughead slipped into the Blue & Gold office. Outside, the rain was drumming down viciously, sheets upon sheets of water that hammered at the roof. Jughead spared a thought for Polly Cooper and whoever else might be trapped outdoors tonight as he fumbled inside his backpack for his laptop. Then he spared more than one thought for Betty Cooper, trapped indoors, worrying about Polly. Jughead doubted that she’d sleep tonight, between her sister’s disappearance and the fact that her parents might possibly be murderers.  
  
If he knew of any other reason why Betty Cooper might not sleep that night, he chose not to admit it to himself.

Jughead forced himself to stay occupied as the laptop powered on. Unrolling his sleeping bag, folding out the cot, plugging in the hot plate--easy, mechanical jobs he had done a thousand times over the past few months.

Across the room, he heard the laptop chime as it reached the log-in screen. Jughead typed in his password (je11yb3an), and pulled up the single file on his desktop.

“ **Chapter 6** ,” he wrote on a fresh page, and then paused, staring at the blank page, watching the cursor wink in and out of oblivion.

It wasn’t like he could leave it out. Sure, he could make Chapter 6 about Archie and the Variety Show. He could spend the next few days hanging around the Pussycats, trying to figure out what the hell went down between Veronica and Archie and Josie and Valerie. He could ask Melody flat-out, since she didn’t seem too invested in the soapy drama of it all.

But none of that had the first thing to do with Jason Blossom’s murder. And whether Jughead liked it or not, eventually, if he wanted the case to come together in the pages of his novel, he would have to write a chapter about Polly. And a chapter about Polly meant a chapter about Betty, and about Alice, and the Sisters of Quiet Mercy.

A chapter about Polly meant explaining how Betty remembered to look for the car. It meant narrating how Betty got out of her house after her parents locked her in her room.

It meant dragging himself, Jughead Jones the Third, out of the shadows as an observer.

Of course, Jughead had been part of the narrative before. He’d written about trying to convince Archie to come forward about the gunshot. He’d written about trying to save the Drive-In, about joining the Blue and Gold. He’d written about coming with Betty to Jason’s funeral. But all of those were things anyone could have done. He had tried to become the reporter in Citizen Kane, asking questions with a shadowed face.

Now, Jughead Jones, future Great American Novelist, had written himself into an ethical corner.

“ _Fear_ ,” he began typing, because it seemed like a fairly appropriate topic, given the fact that Archie had apparently spent the day blowing up his phone with texts about stage fright and werewolves.

Jughead finished an introductory paragraph, then took a break and started heating up some canned soup on the hot plate. Try as he might, he couldn’t manage to make the words come--there was always that nagging uncertainty, _what am I going to do about when I kissed her_?

Leaving aside the very real possibility that someone who knew them might read this when (if) it was published, there was the fact that he’d been very careful to keep what he thought of Betty out of print. He hadn’t written the way that seeing her for the first time all summer was like coming inside out of a raging snowstorm to an inviting, crackling fire. He’d touched lightly on her invitation to join the Blue and Gold, but immediately pivoted to his investigations of Dilton, and he’d structured the Chuck Clayton incident as Veronica’s story, not Betty’s. When they’d gone to Jason’s funeral together, he’d written the scene with Grandma Blossom from a fly-on-the-wall perspective, because it seemed like there was no possible way she should have drawn herself up so close to him, and he was still frightened at how instinctive it had felt to pull her in still tighter, much less to trail his fingers down her back as she stumbled forward alone.

He pulled up a blank page, closed his eyes, and called up the memory of Betty Cooper, trembling and open and vulnerable and shiningly honest, who had looked in his eyes and told him that she thought she might be crazy like her parents. Who had trusted him-- _him_ \--with her greatest fear.

_“Maybe I’m crazy like they are,” she blurted. My hand went to her shoulder before I noticed I’d moved it. She really hadn’t changed much: she calmed down when someone touched her, just like she always had in kindergarten when Cheryl Blossom stole her scented colored pencils. It was like she needed to be reminded that she was still human. Or like she needed proof that someone still supported her._

_In that moment, with my hand on Betty’s shoulder and her eyes gazing into mine appealingly like I might somehow be able to help her, I would gladly have shot Alice Cooper in the head and thrown her into Sweetwater River. (I still wasn’t sold on the torture element, though.)_

That was good. It cut down on the sweetness, reminded people that he was still their snarky, wisecracking narrator of old. Jughead swallowed dryly, trying to ignore the fact that his throat felt like sandpaper. With a determined quirk of his lip, he hit the Enter key.

_“Hey,” I said idiotically, staring down at her, wondering whether Archie could see us from across the yard. “We’re all crazy. We’re not our parents, Betty.”_

For a moment, Jughead considered rewriting some of the dialogue, preserving his enigmatic mystery-boy appeal. But then he remembered the way Betty’s eyes had smiled as she watched him fumble for words, and of course he wouldn’t trade that for the world, it would be like trading Betty herself in for Veronica or Cheryl, for a hollow, polished veneer with nothing of truth or earnestness in it.

_“Also…”_

_“What?’_

_My tongue felt too heavy in my mouth. I swallowed heavily, grasping for the right word. I was a writer; I was above this._

The scene didn’t work without context, Jughead decided. He deleted the last bit and started again.

_“Hey,” I said idiotically, staring down at her, wondering whether Archie could see us from across the yard. “We’re all crazy. We’re not our parents, Betty.”_

_As an investigator, I have to uphold a certain standard of integrity._

_I started writing about the events surrounding Jason’s death under a false assumption: the misguided notion that I could somehow tell this story, a story that tangled through the lives of everyone I’d never-not-known, without getting tangled up in it myself. So let me fix my mistake._

_My name is Forsythe Pendleton Jones III, and I’ve been in love with Betty Cooper since sixth grade._

_I’ve explained that Archie and I grew up together, and I’ve mentioned that Betty has lived next door to Archie her whole life. So the truth is that it was always Archie-Betty-Jughead. We were like Robin Hood, Maid Marian, and Little John; or Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Huck Finn. Something like that, at any rate. Or possibly, to use a more mainstream metaphor, an incestuous-subtext-lite version of Luke, Leia, and Han Solo._

_Then again, that isn’t quite the truth either. It was the truth to begin with, maybe from kindergarten to second grade. But then the whole tutoring incident happened, and Archie and Betty ended up technically engaged, so I spent a couple months backing off._

_In the next few years, I saw less of Betty. Friends grow apart; it happens. Her mom had started cracking down on her spending time with boys, which explains the whole thing. Archie was stubborn enough to break Alice Cooper’s Betty blockade, but not me. Archie has always been a bit fickle, though_ , _so things between Betty and I turned into a timeshare arrangement. When Archie felt like tossing a football around, or he needed homework help, he sought out Betty. If he needed someone to chill and eat burgers with, he sought me out. If we were all three in a class together and Archie wanted to get a good grade on a partner project, he worked with Betty. If he wanted to have fun on a partner project, then scrape something together at the last moment, he worked with me. It was the perfect situation._

_And then in sixth grade, Betty and I had a class together without Archie: Gifted English, with a massive partner project, due the second week of October. A complete analysis of a selected scene from **To Kill a Mockingbird** , presented live to the class._

_Needless to say, I picked Betty to work with. Or maybe she picked me; I don’t know how it went down. But we ended up working together every day in class for four weeks straight. I was over at the Cooper house at all hours, dawn till dusk. Betty and I walked to and from school together, we fitted together bits and pieces of analysis over lunch. She’d come over, ostensibly to babysit Jellybean, and we’d watch the film version again and again, exclaiming over the cinematography, marveling at the acting, until we had the entire movie memorized._

_It was a lot of work to do for one project. But an insightful reader will already know this about Betty Cooper: she gives whole-heartedly, over and over until there’s nothing left. I was the first partner she’d ever had who didn’t know when to call it quits, so we just never stopped working._

_We debated fine points of diction and syntax, we created a running tally of thirty-eight recurring symbols to track, we did extensive research into Harper Lee’s background, and by a week before the deadline, we had come up with one of the most in-depth, informative PowerPoints ever seen at Riverdale Junior High--and it didn’t even contain half of the information we had found. That final week, we spent hours ostensibly practicing our presentation (read: trying to break ourselves of the habit of finishing each other’s sentences.)_

_The weekend was going to be busy, but we had a plan to work around that. Betty was going to homecoming with Archie on Sunday night, as friends. I wasn’t mature enough to understand that “just as friends” was a misnomer, so I hadn’t seen much in it. It was a social outing. Betty and Archie liked social outings; I didn’t. Of course they’d go without me._

_But the plan was the most important part of the night. Betty was going to leave homecoming promptly at eight forty-five, with the excuse that her mom was enforcing her usual curfew. In reality, she was going to change quickly into leggings and bike over to my house, where we’d run through the presentation one last time. It was always good to play things like that safe, we’d decided. By nine fifteen, we’d have finished with our practice run, and she could slip off quickly and make it back to her house before her extended curfew._

_It was eight fifty-nine when Betty texted me to ask if I could do the presentation alone the next day._

_You see, Archie stood her up. He literally forgot that homecoming was a thing that existed (sort of: actually, he knew it existed, but he thought it was a week later than it actually was. In a typical run of bad luck, Vegas had accidentally broken Archie’s phone in a bout of rough-housing, so Betty’s texts went unanswered). Archie Andrews, rather characteristically, spent junior high homecoming weekend binging Netflix movies with Midge Klump, who had wandered over to his house when Moose forgot to pick her up because it was the only one with the lights still on in the upper floors. Somehow, homecoming never came up in their conversation, so Archie remained clueless. When he figured his mistake out, he apologized profusely, and Betty forgave him instantly._

_But I don’t feel like writing what went on between Betty and me when Archie stood her up, because Betty’s an actual person who doesn’t deserve to have her secrets aired to the world, especially when they aren’t relevant to our ongoing investigation_.

_Suffice it to say that Robin, Marian, and Little John was no longer an accurate description of our dynamic. The closest thing I can come up with is James, Lily, and Snape, if James was clueless but not actively mean, Lily had no idea what Snape thought, and Snape was somehow James’s best friend._

_In other words, I fell in love with Betty Cooper in the wheelchair-accessible stall of the women’s restroom at Riverdale Junior High. And then, when I finally coaxed her out of there, when we’d managed to salvage her face from underneath a cakey mess of tears and what I assume was her makeup, when I’d said something ridiculously dumb and she’d laughed like I was freaking Robin Williams, I fell in love with her all over again, when she was hiding with me underneath my sweatshirt as we raced past the windows of her house down to the river. We sat and dangled our feet off the steep side of the bank; we threw sticks into the current and watched them get swept away; we swapped novel recommendations (she thought I should read **The Book Thief** , I offered to lend her my copy of **A** **Prayer** **for** **Owen** **Meany** ). She told me about loving Archie, how much that hurt, how every time he chose something besides her it felt like an invalidation, like it was something she’d done, even if logically she knew it was just Archie being Archie. I listened and nodded and patted her shoulder awkwardly and tried to stop from thinking sappy things about her, because I was not a Star Wars prequel character, and therefore I had no possible excuse to compare Betty Cooper (or any woman, ever) to an angel, no matter what the situation was._

_I fell in love with Betty Cooper for the third time as we stood in her living room and explained to Polly, as succintly as possible, what had happened, and_ could it be kept fairly quiet _? And I stayed in love with her as Alice Cooper came down the stairs and practically dragged Betty away, talking all the while in a poisoned-sugar tone of voice reminiscent of the witch in Hansel and Gretel._

_Obviously, despite the bags under her eyes and the crick in my neck, we nailed the presentation. It had become ingrained in us from all that repetition; like a part of our being._

_Not much changed after that (with a few exceptions)._

_Exception I: Even in classes with Archie, Betty and I worked together on partner projects._

_Exception II: When Betty needed to toss a football around, or do something else befitting Elizabeth “Perfection-Walks-On-Earth” Cooper, she sought out Archie. If she needed to vent, or complain, or pine longingly for Archie, she sought out Kevin._

_When she needed emotional companionship, or someone who talked about the way life must be outside of Riverdale, or someone to watch a movie with who actually appreciated the cinematography, or someone to geek out over a novel with (more like watch her geek out over a novel), or even a shoulder to cry on, no questions asked?_

_Of course it was me she looked for._

_So I climbed over Veronica in the booth at Pop’s, because I hadn’t seen Betty for an entire summer and I wanted to know what she thought of life-outside-Riverdale, and I wanted to see her eyes again and hear her laugh, just to remind myself that they were more beautiful than I’d remembered._

_Growing up the way I did (i.e. dirt-poor with a shitty excuse for a dad), you can’t help but be starved for beauty. I’d been fasting the whole summer on stolen memories of the way Betty gestured with her hands when she talked, little scraps and fragments. Watching her smile curve around the straw in a vanilla milkshake was the Riverdale equivalent of a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art._

_To this day, I still don’t understand how no one else sees that Betty lights up every room she’s in with a soft glow that comes from deep within her._

_Even that day, as she told me she might be insane, that her parents might easily be murderers, that her sister’s story was unconfirmable, she was still glowing faintly._

_“Also--” I stammered._

_Her eyes widened with mild concern. “What?”_

_In the end, things always come down to dualities. Leave or stay. To be or not to be. No try; only do or do not._

_Kiss or don’t kiss._

_On the side of “don’t kiss” was the fact that she was my friend, and Archie was my friend, and Archie would see (eventually) what he had sacrificed when he told her she was too good. “Don’t kiss” was the fact that I wasn’t sure I’d ever want to go farther than a kiss, the fact that the secondary love interest never gets the girl, the fact that Betty had much bigger things to think about like her unlawfully-incarcerated-teen-mom sister and her possibly-murderers-definitely-not-nice-people parents and was I really selfish enough to burden her with my own bundle of insecurities and longing and friend-zone clichès?_

_“Don’t kiss” was my mom telling me to always be a gentleman, was everything my dad did to hurt her--but I’m not my parents._

_Because “kiss”, at that moment, was a whole lot stronger. “Kiss” was the way she sat next to me at lunch with barely an inch of space between us. It was the sheer desperation that had clawed at my chest when she ran forward to hug Polly, the unflinching instinct to help her at all costs. “Kiss” was the way her favorite books matched up with my hold list at the library, the way we could communicate without saying a word, the way she’d straightened her spine bravely and hid the terror in her eyes when her mother marched her down the hall, the way I could still make her laugh after all these years, the way she tightened up her ponytail before we went into the Home for Troubled Youth like she was gearing up for battle, the way she looked back at me for reassurance when Grandmother Blossom called her Polly, the way she always forgave (but never forgot). It was the fact that she was beautiful in tears and caked-on makeup, that she would do literally anything to save her sister, that she put the card up on the bulletin board herself even though her hands trembled, that she wrote the best short stories in our class, that she was always busy but always had time for me._

_“Kiss” was the fact that she had just looked down at my lips._

_With a final nervous swallow, I reached for her golden hair, my thumb finding haven on her cheek, my wrist coming to rest lightly on her shoulder, and my lips taking refuge against hers._

Jughead shut the laptop and took the soup off the hot plate to let it cool.

 _Again_ , he continued, _I see no reason to let a voyeuristic audience in on the nuances of kissing Betty Cooper. Our situation just happens to be a part of the case, something that has to be addressed in order for the puzzle pieces to fall into place. There are other books willing and able to tell interested readers what it’s like to kiss the girl of one’s dreams_.

_When Betty pulled away, our noses brushed against each other's. Her eyes fluttered closed, and she smiled like she does when she puts on a soft sweater, or savors the last sip in a mug of hot chocolate. It was a soft, sweet, lazy, contented smile, reminiscent of nothing so much as a cat basking in a sunbeam. She might have been about to purr. “To be continued,” she whispered gently._

Jughead reread what he’d written as he ate his soup, forcing the broth down his throat past the rapidly growing lump.

He’d written that he didn’t want to broadcast their personal lives, but that was literally exactly what he’d done. With a sick hollow feeling in his chest, Jughead read the passage as if he was Archie, feeling nauseating waves of betrayal washing over him at the way “his” best friends truly viewed him. He read the passage as if he were Alice, then decided he didn’t care what Alice thought.

But when he read it as if he were Betty, he had next to no idea what she’d think, whether she’d be okay with it. Parts of the narrative clearly crossed a line (though the rest of the novel probably crossed more lines, what with its depiction of Polly and Alice and Hal). He imagined she’d smile at parts, dispute others (“C'mon,  _seriously_ , Juggy? You think I _glow?_ _Really?_ ”), and mainly worry about what their friends would think if (when) they read it.

That was the problem. What he had with Betty was special: quiet, patient, and kind, like their respective souls were two halves of a single being, joined by invisible hinges. But it was also private, and intimate, and painfully fragile.

Jughead pulled the document for his novel back up and spent the next hour writing a scene where Betty broke out of her locked room and met Jughead to review the evidence so far. She remembered the car when Archie’s father’s truck drove past the window. It was almost excruciatingly simple to retire his character back into the shadows.

He hit the save button and tried to exit the program, but a pop-up window jumped to the foreground. _Would_ _you_ _like_ _to_ _save_ _Document2.docx?_

Jughead left it up there as he pulled his shoes off and changed into sweatpants. He ran a well-used toothbrush briefly over his teeth, set his hat on the desk, and sat down once more.

“ _Yes_ ,” he clicked.


End file.
